


I Was, I Am, I Will Be

by sparrowinsky



Category: Byzantium (2012)
Genre: Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, Referenced Canonical Rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 21:45:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2827136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparrowinsky/pseuds/sparrowinsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clara Webb is a clever girl.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Was, I Am, I Will Be

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Assimbya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Assimbya/gifts).



Of course, she tries to go home.

Call it that same rebellious streak that led her to the back of Captain Ruthven’s horse. Clara is only a girl, but a clever one, and in the light of morning no one stops her. She simply walks out the front door as if she’s meant to, because she is meant to, because she’s no whore, just a sometimes foolish girl.

Clara comes home to dour silence. It could be the look in her mother’s eyes, or the way her sisters turn their faces from her, but she knows, before anyone says a word.

“Only came to get my things,” she says, breezy, flashing her best and sweetest smile while her stomach lurches and her heart trembles.

Where else can she go, then, but back?

Clara Webb has no home.

 

—

 

Clara doesn’t think the way Eleanor does, that is to say _constantly_ and about the most dour and depressing things.

Why bother? Much more fun to be clever and wicked and quick, to amuse herself with men, to lose herself in darkness and heat.

Poor, poor Eleanor, so obsessed with _memories_ and the _past_ and _stories._

Clara could tell her that the past isn’t worth knowing and memories are just cruel tricks of the mind. She’s _tried_ , but the girl won’t listen. Eleanor would rather scribble down incriminations and be blessed angel of death than listen to her mother, who might know a thing or two.

The past is only pain, and if Clara lets herself stop, lets herself think, it floods her from top to bottom like rancid sea-water, until she chokes on it.

 

—

 

Eight months and thirteen days, from the evening she took the Captain’s hand.

Clara counted each and every moment.

It was all mess and pain and blood, tedious hours of it, and she meant to hate the thing, _Ruthven’s_ get, a vile leech sitting in her for the better part of a year.

She hates its until she looks at it, until she sees the clear blue eyes and soft hair and sweet pink smile. Her child.

Hers alone.

She’s meant to expose her baby, to be rid of it; so, fine, she is rid of it, and of all her meager savings too, into the care and keeping of nuns who would gladly see sinful Clara dead, like as not.

But the baby, sweet innocent Eleanor, they’ll keep. Eleanor will have good things even if Clara has to sell every inch of her soul to see it done.

For the first time in almost a year, Clara breathes easy, knowing the path she must walk.

 

—

 

Clara tries to convince herself that she’s happy without Eleanor’s constant nagging, her ridiculous worries, her questions, her stories. It’s easier, right? Just herself to worry about.

She tells herself so, but the lies are harder to swallow with every passing year.

It’s easier with Darvell. He expects so little of her.

“I expected you to be a good young girl and listen to me,” he says, when she asks on one cool autumn night. “And then I expected you were a senseless woman who wouldn’t understand the first thing I said. And then I expected you to follow the Brotherhood’s directions. Clara, you’ve never done the things I expected you to do, why should I keep on doing it?”

So there it is. Clara is free to be… anything, anything at all. Anyone. She tries on personalities like coats, and for a good fifty years they blaze quiet trails through the night, drifting around each other like distant stars. He comes and goes, so does she.

And yet, when she’s been everyone she can think to be, when Darvell is away and her means are limited and she knows for a certainty she’s still her same old self, and never going to change, she finds herself drifting in memories. Old ones, old pains, and new ones; make-believe ones, the kind of stories she would have told a young Eleanor if she’d had the chance.

Memories like _I took Darvell’s hand instead,_ though it was never offered; _I kept my daughter,_ though where would she have gone?

Pretending in her own head, simply to soften the edges that cut her into shape. It’s pathetic, it’s as bad as Eleanor’s scribblings, never mind that they were truer.

The worst one is this: _I killed Ruthven, he never touched my daughter._ It’s the oldest one, the one she’s dreamed every night for two and a half centuries, the one that wakes her screaming.

 

—-

 

The sun is glorious.

The wind, too; the rocks, the cold, the spray of salt-water.

The moss. Clara spends a full hour sprawled against a boulder, stroking the lovely green stuff, the texture as clear as day beneath her fingers, until hunger begins to claw at her ribs.

Always clever, Clara, even before this new sharpness casting everything in relief. She knows in an instant this hunger is like no other.

Her boat’s drifted away, or sunk, or stolen, but it doesn’t matter: she dives into the water, marvelous and cold, and swims unerringly for shore, the phantom taste of blood against her tongue.

 

—

 

Clara finds Eleanor again, when she’s ready to be found. No stupid boy in tow, either, simply Eleanor, with her clear blue eyes and soft hair and sweet, melancholy smiles.

It’s Clara who sees her first, though she’s no doubt Eleanor meant to be found.

High summer, the sun at its zenith, the day a blur of bright golden heat, and she sees her across a desiccated park, head down, scribbling in a notebook. Of course, always writing.

Clara’s heart breaks in an instant, and stitches itself back together just as quick, but beats a little too fast. It’s been too long. Too much time with just herself, more now than she ever had with her daughter.

Then Eleanor looks up, hair falling in her eyes as it always has, and Clara can’t help herself: she runs, moves too quickly, recklessly, and gathers her daughter up in her arms.

 

—

 

Clara and Eleanor Webb have no home. They need no home. They drift apart, and return to each other.

The world collapses and rebuilds around them, and it _belongs_ to them, and no other.

Clara will have it no other way.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope this fits with what you were looking for, Assimbya! :) It was a fun prompt to write.
> 
> Happy Yuletide!


End file.
